After a pair of covers — a chart-topping, grassy version of Gabe Dixon’s “All Will Be Well” and the 90s country flavored “Make Me Stay or Make Me Go” — sextet Sister Sadie (nominated for this year’s Best Bluegrass Album GRAMMY) shift into a more contemplative mood with their new Mountain Home Music Company single, a glistening original ballad.
“I don’t write too many love songs,” confesses its lead singer, Dani Flowers. “Most of the songs in my catalogue are admittedly pretty depressing. But ‘If I Don’t Have You’ is just that — a love song about loving someone so much that everything you’ve ever wanted or hoped to accomplish now pales in comparison to the need you have to be with that person.”
Cast almost as a conversation between Flowers’ vocal and co-writer Deanie Richardson’s fiddle, the track gets off to a luxuriant start with a full statement of the melody from the latter that sets up the opening verse’s simple, plaintive statement that leads inexorably to the memorable chorus:
I could climb the highest mountain
Make my dollars by the thousands
I could have it all and then some
But I’d still be sad and lonesome
If I don’t have you to hold on to
When the nights are long, when the day is through
Everything I have, or anything I’ll do
Don’t mean half as much if I don’t have you
With a delicious harmony line contributed by fellow Sadie — and recent recipient of the IBMA’s Female Vocalist of the Year award — Jaelee Roberts, and a gentle accompaniment built on delicately rolling figures from banjo, mandolin and piano, the track adds a surprising new dimension near its end by resolving its suspended rhythms into a more active feel before Richardson returns to bring the performance to an end in a lingering coda.
“Dani came to me with this sweet melody and the first two lines of this song,” the award-winning fiddler recalls. “We finished it that day. This is my favorite kind of love song: simple melody and simple lyrics. It doesn’t get much better than Dani’s angelic voice singing about how going through life and experiencing the most amazing things wouldn’t mean half as much ‘If I Don’t Have You.’”
"If I Don't Have You" is streaming in Dolby Atmos spatial audio on Apple Music, Amazon Music and TIDAL. Listen to it HERE.
